Rough field capable, easy maintenance, and rugged airframe.
A DC-3 goes for about 400,000 to 1,000,000 USD currently on the open market.
even at 2,000,000 apiece fitted out, you could by a lot of them.
Posted on 07/27/2019 7:55:43 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
When something isn’t very good, someone may joke that it’s still “good enough for government work.” Maybe the thinker who coined that expression had the F-35 program in mind.
The F-35 (also known as the Joint Strike Fighter) is a military jet that was supposed to be able to do it all. The program was started in the 1990s with the intention that it could serve the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines and their various mission needs with only minimal changes to the initial platform. That would deliver cost savings across decades as one jet replaced (at least) three other types of plane. It seemed like a great idea in concept.
But, predictably, the jet that tried to do everything ended up having more problems than successes. By the time designers had added stealth technology, short runway functionality, and various weapon systems, they had a jet that was too bulky, too slow and too costly. “The result is an expensive jack-of-all-trades, but a master of none,” The National Interest's Dave Majumdar writes, calling the JSF “one of the 5 worst fighter jets ever made.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. By this time, Lockheed was supposed to be churning out F-35 jets at a cost of $40-$50 million each. Instead, the military now says it wants to buy 470 of the fighters, at a cost of $34 billion. That would be more than $80 million per plane, twice what was promised.
Yet even as it tries to buy more of these planes, throwing good money after bad, the Pentagon admits the JSF program is failing. The Air Force’s top testing official wrote in 2016 that the F-35 is “not effective and not suitable across the required mission areas and against currently fielded treats.”
It also falls short of existing platforms. Military analyst Dan Grazier writes, “In the air-to-air mission, the current F-35 is similarly incapable of matching legacy aircraft like the F-15, F-16, and F-22.” And when it comes to supporting troops on the ground, one job the JSF was supposed to be designed for, “testing shows the F-35 is incapable of performing most of the functions required for an acceptable close support aircraft, functions the A-10 is performing daily in current combat.” One reason for that failure is that the F-35’s guns aren’t very accurate. A report noted that pilots routinely miss their targets because of software failures.
Plus, contractor Lockheed Martin struggles to even keep the F-35 in the air. “A handful of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters built during the early days of the program could become unflyable by 2026, after just 2,100 flight hours,” Popular Mechanics wrote this year. “The culprit is almost certainly the F-35’s design and production plan, which involved starting to build the planes before the final design specifications were set.”
Just last month, the Pentagon’s Inspector General said Lockheed may have over-billed the military by more than $10 million for spare parts that were never delivered. “We determined that the DoD did not receive RFI F‑35 spare parts in accordance with contract requirements and paid performance incentive fees on the sustainment contracts based on inflated and unverified F‑35A aircraft availability hours,” a report concluded. Spare parts wouldn’t save the plane, but we shouldn’t be wasting money on parts we never even get.
The Washington Post reports that “the late senator John McCain called the F-35 a ‘poster child for acquisition malpractice’ a ‘scandal’ and a ‘tragedy’ at different points during his tenure as Senate Armed Services Committee chairman.” I frequently disagreed with Sen. McCain, but he was correct here. Even after all the time and money invested, the F-35 isn’t very good.
Not very good isn’t good enough for the men and women in military uniform. They deserve the best tools our country can give them. The over-budget, under-delivering F-35 is not such a tool, and it’s not “good enough for government work.”
Could, maybe, might, unauthorized source, unidentified source. This is the crap that comes from people ignorant of the facts.
Fact, the F-35 is killing everything in the air in air combat training with the exception of the F-22’s.
Even the eagle drivers who have never had a combat loss are dead meat in the F-35 sights.
That is the primary function of this aircraft, killing other planes. Software can be modified and improved and accuraized. If the plane can not stay in the air and kill other airborne threat it is worthless in any capacity and the F-35 does that in grand style.
Claims that the F35 is a dog in air combat will come as news to the pilots that fly them because they seem to be doing just fine.
In the BVR arena, assuming everyone have AMRAAMs, the F-35 will always win. If an F-15 or F-16 makes it to the merge, then it is pilot vs pilot...and yes, occasionally the F-15 or F-16 will win.
Your comments about the A-10 are noteworthy. Well stated.
The point is that it has been decades to get to where the F-35 is now. No airplane should take decades to design.
No one aircraft can do it all. This battle went on before with the F-111 and we ended up with the F-14, F-15, F-16 and A-10
Drones, pilot free jets in the future, which jets/helicopters are right for which terrain..
I don’t even pretend to know FIVE PERCENT of what I would need to i order to give you a competent conversation on the subject.
You know the old saying “Better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you’re an idiot..” :)
I WILL say that at the end of the day our military has things that we either don’t know about or things we know of but are capable of more than we are led to believe.
Didn’t they fry an iranian drone last week??
God only knows the things (even if they aren’t many) that we have but are not know to the public.
or i could be completely wrong :)
They have been trying to kill the A10 since before it was even in full production.
It’s an amazing aircraft but the real secret is the pilots that fly them. They have been able to adapt to keep it relevant and an effective , ieven rreplaceable weapon by skill, innovative tactics, dedication and big brass balls.
And yeah, the most serious threat to the A10 are the Air Force brass that would really like to have the A10 go away for going on 40 years
[Maybe these guys know we have the tic-tac UFO fighter]
Off topic. I saw a video interviewing the senior officer of the two-ship F-18 flight that intercepted the Tic-Tac UFO.
People were asking, why does the government all of a sudden want people to know about UFO’s? (or so it seems)
Here’s what’s ODD to me - I swear the guy they interviewed is the SAME GUY that was the senior F-18 squadron commander from Mel Gibson’s “Carrier” series that was on PBS.
If I may adjust my tinfoil hat for a second (LOL) the odds of this guy being in BOTH (the Tic-Tac UFO incident) seems like a stretch to me.
I haven’t looked the guy up to check the names. Now I will. But it sure looked like the same guy to me (except older, of course).
Weird....I mean it’s not impossible, of course, but it’s like they had a “camera ready” guy who had already played a part.
Sorry, I just thought it was weird.
(I don’t know that it’s a conspiracy, LOL, I just find it odd the guy just happens to star in “Carrier” and now he’s made several episodes of shows as the guy who went down to take a closer look at the Tic-Tac UFO).
I now return you to the F-35 show.
You should have seen me trying to talk people out of “Swiss Army Knife” software.
One memorable occasion, two similar interfaces but the guts were completely different. Had it been designed from the outset that way, it ***might*** have been possible.
Merging the two versions was a recipe for disaster (Windows-based code). I was fortunate to talk them out of it.
Yes, it was actually easier to maintain the two separate programs. I could steal some code and put in the other one. Though the interfaces looked almost the same, the plumbing was much different under the hood.
We would have wound up with one clunky version that didn’t perform as well as either predecessor, spent all the money, and created just more problems for the user.
It all sounds great in theory, until.....reality.
On 20 July 2001, during DEMVAL, to demonstrate the X-35's unique capability (compared to the X-32), the X-35B STOVL aircraft took off in less than 500 feet (150 m), went supersonic, and landed vertically.
No they have all they need to restart production, but the problem is that a restart would cost more than a designed from scratch plane.
The F-22 still does not have the promised HUD display - one of the few modern fighters that does not.
With a gun that has about 160 rounds and four internal missiles - other than those on ‘stealth’-killing external mounts, it stands little chance alone against other adversarial modern fighters with BVR missiles in a “deep interdiction missions in highly contested air space”. The software is still mostly an incomprehensible mess requiring constant maintenance. Last I heard the Israelis have parked their F-35s, while the US fleet has only a 4% combat ready rate with no improvements in sight - particularly with the removal of the Turkish and European F-35 spare parts industry.
The F15-16 and variants have a specific missions which they are unsurpassed at, while the F-35 has many missions none of which it is unsurpassed at preforming and never will barring a complete re-design. The pilots love flying it - so the story goes - but then they only get to fly the hanger queen once in a while before returning it to the hanger for more extensive maintenance and updates. God help them if they encounter a hostile SU-35 or a J-10 “in highly contested air space”, cause all they can do is run - but not too far ...
A-10s are being re-winged and upgraded to carry Hellfire variants as well as various intel packages. Some are being taken out of the bone yards and rebuilt. They will be around as long as ground wars are fought or someone builds a CAS A-10 replacement (not the F-35).
Instead this is the most botched program in history along with the littoral combat chips.
F-35 sux rotten chicken eggs
The F-111 was envisioned as a multi service platform, but the navy variant didn’t cut the mustard. The navy killed it, but the engines in a new naval friendly airframe became the F-14. Evidently those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Many military people wrote this thing off way back when it was first being developed just because it was to be that jack-of-all-trades. Meanwhile the Israelis keep reinventing the F-15 as the superior aircraft. An excellent purpose built A/C turns out to be modifiable in many directions to do whatever is needed.
Nice idea but would not survive on CAS missions - too noisy, no pilot or systems protections, exposed engines etc.
JSF = TFX Remember the TFX? The one aircraft that was supposed to do it all. Another Mcnamara boondoogle. Too heavy to land on carriers, not maneuverable enough as a fighter, finally ended up as a very limited purpose FB-111.
Of course our brass and money managers have screwed the pooch again. There never will be a one size fits all military weapon whether its an aircraft, cannon, rifle, or vehicle. The ephemeral goal of economic military solutions is pretty much pie in the sky. Ya gets what ya pay for except in the case of rationalised compromises.
I do think, though, that the F-22 buy should have been doubled.
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